OK, not really praise; Roberts’s failure to strangle the Obamacare baby in its crib when he had the chance will go down alongside the Dred Scott decision as one of the greatest moral disasters in the history of the republic. The man in charge of enforcing the Constitution blinked when confronted with a triumphalist party and a then-popular president, forgetting that he, Roberts, would likely be in Washington long after Obama was gone. In an attempt to save the Supreme Court’s reputation and standing, he destroyed it.

Still, even if inadvertently, Roberts got one thing right: the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act is a tax, and nothing but a tax. A punitive, regressive tax, to be sure — but a tax nonetheless. A tax on ideological stupidity, as its supporters are just now learning. Just wait til the “employer mandate” kicks in.

Remember that the PDUCA has nothing whatsoever to do with “health care.” That was just the heartstring-tugging pretense to mask a breathtaking power grab by the Democrats. No one’s health will be improved by the passage of this law, although many may well be adversely affected. Nor it is even really about “insurance.” For how can we call covering pre-existing conditions “insurance”? You can only insure against something in the future, not something that’s already occurred. Call it a socialized risk pool, or some such, but don’t call it “insurance.”

No, what Obamacare is — and was always meant to be — is an onerous tax on the middle class, wearing the usual Leftist disguise of “compassion.” With soaring deductibles and higher premiums for all, but “subsidies” for some, it’s a huge transfer of wealth from those who can least afford it, prostituting the insurance companies (through which the monies will flow) in the service of a governmental enterprise both unasked for and constitutionally uncalled for.

In effect, what Obamacare does is destroy the concept of insurance completely: if your deductible soars to $6,250 (the “bronze” plan) — meaning the amount you will have to pay out of your own pocket — then you might as well not have “insurance” at all, and simply pay a fee for service, at much lower rates. Meanwhile, your “premiums” become an entirely new, unplanned-for expense that will net you… nothing you didn’t already have before. Far better to simply buy catastrophic insurance and otherwise pay as you go.

What big teeth you have, Grandma

But that would defeat the whole point of Obama’s enterprise. As I wrote over at NRO’s The Corner in March 2012:

Does anyone — on either side — really think that the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act is about health care?

For if it’s about “health care,” aren’t there a myriad of ways in which the system could be improved without a “comprehensive” top-down solution? At a time of extreme economic dislocation, was there a nationwide clamor to make “health care” the top priority of the new administration?

Or is it really about the exercise of raw governmental power, to teach the citizenry an object lesson about the coming brave new world, one that surely will get even worse once Obama is safely past the shoals of his last election?

To believe in the “good intentions” of the former — as soft-headed conservatives are sometimes wont to do when crediting the hard Left with anything but sheer malevolence toward the country as founded — is to have to pretzel one’s mind around the internal contradictions of the bill itself (it’s a tax! It’s not a tax!) and the way in which it was imposed just a couple of years ago by a one-party Congress that no longer exists, having been rebuked and sent packing by an outraged electorate.

Far easier to believe in the latter — that Obamacare is just the canary in the coal mine of what’s coming next. That, once having established the hammer, the administration will use Obamacare (should the law be found constitutional) as the anvil upon which to smash the Republic once and for all. And the “progressives’s” Long March through the institutions will finally end in the all-powerful centralized government for which they’ve long yearned.

Sure, it’s fun to watch Obamacare implode — but it helps to remember that its very impracticality is a feature, not a bug. For the cure for “Reform” is always more “Reform,” not less. This isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning. Maybe the next time the Roberts Court has a chance to put this thing out of its misery, it’ll take it.

Exactly. If the Court had struck down the ACA, imagine the Democrat & Leftist (but I repeat myself) reaction: "Conservative white Christian men took away your free healthcare! Vote Democrat & give the Supreme Court back to Teh Peepul!" Exactly as 9/11 forced many of us to acknowledge the jihadi threat, the disaster of Big Government can no longer be fantasized away. Chief Justice Roberts just might have saved us all...

" Maybe the next time the Roberts Court has a chance to put this thing out of its misery, it’ll take it..."

The part about forced coverage of birth control anyway, but not the whole monstrosity which a single SCOTUS guy might have quashed.

Was John Roberts influenced at the last moment by some ill founded wish to not (further) compromise the Court's status by appearing to mess with the legislative process ? Does his seizure medication interfere with cognitive function ?

I believe if Roberts had cast his vote with Scalia, the hard lesson the useful/useless idiots HAD TO learn, would have been missing. Scalia was right, of course. He is the best and the brightest on this Court...which is why he is the most slandered. Thomas is slandered because he repudiates the "victim class mandate".

Yet, the ONLY way to trump guilt-tripping and permanent propaganda that passes for Democrat "Party" politics...is to have the dim and the dull experience it.

Obamacare is not a tax, it was argued to the public. It is a tax, it was argued to the Court.

How could they lie to us?!!?! It's easy when you are so practiced at it and you have no conscience.

Yet, it really is NOT a tax. It's forced reparations...payback.

When Michael Pfleger put on that cringeworthy minstrel act about "yo 401k and yo daddy's 401k and yo grand daddy's 401k", he let the cat out of the bag...claws, fangs and furball.

Obamacare is about "redistribution". Punishment for sins of the father. Yes, race.

It is an ugly sentiment that squares the circle of the global warming hoax. It connects the dots to the CRA-created crash of the economy. It attritions out the bitter clingers that AYERS and The Weathermen wanted to murder.

Don't turn your back on your people, don't buy into what "the man" tells you, Obama learned at the knee of Frank Marshall Davis. And Don Warden.

Guilty as hell...and free as a bird. An object lesson from Bill Ayers.

You can take down an entire country through its banks, a lesson from George Soros.

Israel and America can be torn apart, learned at dinners with Rashid Khalidi.

No, Michael...Obamacare is not a tax. It is a vehicle intended to carry Pandora's Box of small c communist ills and smother the "oppressors" with them. It was never intended to "work" as "insurance". It was intended to work as penance. Retribution. Payback. Punishment.

I’m actually tired of having to post this crap over and over and over but seems very few “get” it.Obamcare has nothing to do with a tax or whatever it was supposed to be according to Roberts.It has everything to do with Roberts having the sh_t blackmailed out of him by the regime!!!Robert's wife insisted on adopting blue-eyed blond- haired children from her parents home county of Cork, Ireland.She found two mothers willing to give up a boy and a girl. Turns out it’s really hard to adopt them directly from Ireland to the US so they had the birth mothers go to Central America where they were adopted by the Roberts and sent to the US.Evidently this fast and loose game did not go unnoticed by the regime.When the time was right they most likely asked Roberts to choose between “0” care and his kids. Guess what he picked?Here’s some documentation that is hard to refute since its from the NYT among others!

“(Editor’s Note: Found the below post when reading headlines over at WhatReallyHappened dot com. The headline reads “How Roberts was blackmailed to support ObamaCare” and it was written by a poster at the Liberty Caucus blog who goes by the user name “Trip.” This poster has done some digging into Supreme Court Justice John Roberts adoption of two Irish children born months apart by two different mothers, which in and of itself is fairly benign, but there is a problem, the laws governing adoption in Ireland are clear–“all adoptions go through [a] government board, An Bord Uchtala” including what American’s call “private adoption.” Yet, the Roberts adopted these two children through an unspecified Latin American country. If, and this is a really BIG IF, but if the Robert’s adoption of these two children circumvented Ireland’s laws by having the mothers transported to a Latin American country with friendly adoption laws to give birth, well then the Chief Justice may have very well have broken a few laws and IF, again, this is a really BIG IF, if someone in DC learned of these facts who is to say they may not be using them to blackmail the Chief Justice? We know former Illinois Sen. Ryan’s sealed divorce records mysteriously became public when he was running against Mr. Obama in 2004. Who is to say a similar tactic wasn’t used to convince Roberts to be the swing vote that brought us Obamacare? It’s as good a theory as any other. Roberts did switch his vote at the last minute…why?) - See more at: http://www.t-room.us/2013/01/unraveling-the-mystery-behind-chief-justice-roberts-sudden-switch-to-rule-in-favor-of-obamacare/#sthash.hU6N1Aqn.dpuf&quot;;

I have begun to wonder if Roberts had forseen the spin-crash-burn of liberalism. If he had ended obamacare we might have gotten complacent about the grand plans of the Left and they may have been able to get enough sympathy for other plans like Amnesty for Illegals. The way this is happening we are all being directly hurt by obamacare and now that the injury is personal, not just political, people are more likely to get off their duffs and vote in the 2014 mid-term. Is Roberts that subtle?

I wonder if Obama had something on Roberts to cause him to vote the way he did. The fact that the Congress can force an individual to purchase something he doesn't want is beyound me. Next will they force us all to purchase Volts?

I am a 61 yer old female whose has had a hysterectomy, so I am more than upset that I have to pay for maternity care & birth control pills for myself. However, I am REJOICING at paying for birth control pills & abortions for others...why? Because, IF these females breed, their offspring are very likely to be drug addicted, neglected or abused & if these offspring make it into grade school in a public (government) school they will be indoctrinated into the government school mindset, recruited into gangs, drug addicted themselves (Ritalin and/or street drugs...take your pick) & if they make it to high school, & can find a gun, will become the next Adam Lanza. For these offspring, it's best for us all if they are not allowed their fist breath of air. Suddenly, when these likelihood's come into focus, taxpayer supported birth control pills & abortion are at the very least, a cheaper burden on the taxpayer, & at best a preemptive drawdown on the welfare roles...viva birth control pills & abortion!!

Nobody blackmailed or intimidated or bamboozled Roberts into siding with socialism. He's been on that team all along.

He's a mole. Or rather, was a mole. He was "activated" when the right time came, and his cover's been pretty well blown now. Expect more bad rulings from him.

Why do I say he was a mole?

John Roberts worked for Reagan. He was given the job of vetting potential SCOTUS nominees. He's the guy who gave a glowing, two thumbs up, report to a certain potential candidate, despite her being a well-known abortion activist.

In another generation or 2 there might not even be a need for a Supreme Court.Our constitutional republic is being transformed into something different from what it was intended to be. We don't really know yet what it will be only that it will NOT be a constitutional republic. Perhaps a Parliament style system where the majority just basically dictates and the minority whines.

They dug up some dirt on Roberts at the last minute. Maybe he's a closeted homosexual. Maybe he had an affair ten years ago and they found his love emails in all that NSA metadata. But he was not his own creature when he wrote that decision. Count on it. It's the Chicago way.

When they first passed the Constitution the Rich States were nervous the Federal Government would tax them more than the smaller poor states so there was a provision in the Constitution that is still there that says the Federal Government must tax all the States proportionally. When A. Lincoln's War Congress tried an income tax to pay the extraordinary cost of putting down the rebellion and eradicating human slavery in the southern half of the country that was fomenting that rebellion eventually someone petitioned SCOTUS, after the rebellion was put down, that this "income tax" was not proportional among the states and was for that reason unconstitutional. SCOTUS agreed. To get around this logical conclusion, Rockefeller, his sone in law, and Morgan and the boys at Jeckyl Island had to pass a Constitutional Amendment to bring the Income Tax back with the Federal Reserve (private banks printing governmental money????) which they did in 1912.

What's the point? Obama exempted certain states from the Obamacare tax. It has nothing to do with income. It is not proportionally assessed between the states. It is not based on income.

It was specifically passed by Congress not as a Tax and then upheld by Scotus as a tax.

I would say it is Unconstitutional on that basis.

Where was the Congressional effort to make it

a) proportional among the states (some were exempted)

b) based on income. Preexisting conditions were exempted regardless of income.

Roberts left the door open for Congress to do just that. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough GOP/conservatives to do so at the time. Also unfortunately, it's extremely difficult for one branch of government to sue another branch through the third. Separation of powers and all that. It SHOULD have been up to the people to dump the Democrats who voted for it w/o even reading it and repeal it. That's what Robert's opinion expressly advised.

There's room to debate Justice Roberts' opinion in NFIB v Sebelius. I think he made a valid decision, though perhaps I would not have reached it. I do not for a moment believe it was cowardice or coercion or sycophancy that guided him.One of the key elements of NFIB v Sebelius, an element with a 9-0 vote, was that the Commerce Clause was less broad than Obama and the Enablers wanted to make it. The court unanimously ruled that Congress could not make a criminal offense out of not having healthcare insurance. Congress could choose to impose a tax on those who don't choose to have insurance, but that's a somewhat different kettle of fish. Those were the only issues before the court. By precedent, at least, the court may only rule on the issues brought before it and must rule in the light most favorable to legislation if possible.That ruling opens up the door to an origination case -- the point that revenue bills have to originate in the House and this didn't. That issue wasn't before Roberts and the court and they could not properly rule on it until it comes up through the appellate system.When the issue of mandates that offend conscience comes up, and it's on the docket now, we'll see how that plays out. Not all issues of conscience win at that level -- if you ran a religious daycare center and you claimed a religious objection to checking employees for sex offender status, I think you'd lose. But I don't think that's on the cards here. The ruling I'd like is along the lines of "the federal government can no more compel coverage of contraception than it can prohibit it."There's also the question of whether the Commerce Clause can be contorted to give the federal government authority to issue mandates to insurance companies at all. As I understand things now, you don't have to buy a DemBamaCare compliant policy -- but that's all an insurance company can offer. Perhaps that can be undone.But these issues have to originate with a district court case and find their way to the Supremes.Let's not paint Justice Roberts a coward or a traitor at this point.

You missed a huge part of the SCOTUS ruling. Roberts ruled that the ObamaCare penalties were not a tax and therefore the case could continue to be litigated. The Anti-injunction Act forbids tax litigation until the taxes are actually administered and collected. Justice Alito brought this up during the oral argument, and the Solicitor General said the fees were not taxes but fines.

But, during the actual case, Roberts pulled a bait and switch and ruled that the fees were in fact taxes and not fines.

I called an insurance broker & got a quote on a very attractive PPO, & it was independent of Obamacare. Hubby & I decided against it however because it was not only $350.00 more per month, but didn't cover what I need. My oncologist recommended acupuncture for chemo induced neuropathy & yoga to rebuild my abs from the 10" incision from my hysterectomy. My physical therapist recommended pilates to regain the flexibility in my right foot after an accident, & swimming to rebuild the cartilage in my knee. Since these healing modalities are referred to as "wellness" they are not covered & we have to pay out of pocket for this, so the PPO is really just an expensive "sick care plan" & we prefer to pursue "wellness", so we got the cheapest crappy HMO we can buy & will pay cash for both "sick care" (mis-labeled as "health care") & for our "wellness care".